Aside from reading e-books and entertaining my 2-year-old daughter, I have been using our newly arrived iPad in the kitchen. As long as you can avoid slathering it with grease and dusting it (lightly or otherwise) with flour, it beats phones and laptops for overall kitchen-counter friendliness, and is poised to be an indispensable tool, once enough of the cookbooks we all love go digital.

At launching, there were at least 10 interactive cooking apps available that were made to fit the iPad’s larger screen, and there are more hitting iTunes’ App Store every week. Among the culinary throng, two stood out: Epicurious and BigOven Pro. The pedigrees of the two apps are vastly different, one patrician, the other proletarian.

At Epicurious’s heart is the Conde Nast library of recipes — 28,000 in total — mostly ones that appeared in Gourmet and Bon Appetit. BigOven, which has a free iPhone app but sells a much better “Pro” iPad app for $5 $9.99, is a community project. There are over 170,000 recipes in BigOven’s database, all entered by users with funny Internet bylines like “Charlieh907.” (I’m no copyright lawyer, but with posts called “Mario Batali’s Paella” attributed to people called “LesSmythe,” BigOven illustrates the challenge of defending authorship of a recipe in the Internet age.) Regardless of their source, the recipes are helpful, especially when you skim through several on the same subject, as I like to do. Fortunately, Epicurious also has duplicates, the inevitable updates and twists on classic dishes that you’d expect when combining a few decades’ worth of popular magazines.

When you use the apps, they feel quite similar. When the iPad is held horizontally, both have search and navigation controls on the left-hand side. Both allow you to e-mail recipes, and compile and share grocery lists based on the recipes you’re browsing.

One advantage BigOven has over Epicurious is the Grocery List feature. When it comes to making grocery lists, both apps let you send required recipe ingredients to an interactive checklist. But BigOven appears to understand that you may indeed already own salt, while Epicurious makes you put it on the list no matter what. Anything accidentally on BigOven’s list can be removed fast; not so with Epicurious. And best of all, while both apps let you mail a grocery list, you can use an iPhone or a Web browser to look at a list you make with BigOven, so that someone at home can create a list that’s immediately visible to someone who’s headed to the store. Epicurious’ app can’t do this.

(For everyday use, I still prefer the iPhone-only app GroceryIQ: it can scan bar codes, and understands that trips to the grocery are just as likely to involve deodorant, paper towels and AA batteries as the required ingredients for risotto ai Gamberri.)

BigOven’s “Use Up Leftovers” is another nice feature. It was previously known as the “Leftover Wizard,” though my pet theory is that the name changed for the iPad edition when the company realized nobody would hang out with someone called the “Leftover Wizard,” no matter how good a cook.

Regardless of its name, the feature lets you identify up to three orphaned ingredients in your fridge or pantry (bacon, black beans, cilantro) and in return presents you with some palatable options: “Black Bean Soup,” or “Extraordinary Turkey Chili.” Even if you know how to make these, it’s helpful to have some system to aid in your brainstorming, especially if you’re cooking like so many of us do, after a long day of work.

BigOven’s community involvement may be its biggest asset, but it is also its Achilles’ heel. Its glossary is nice but the selection of words seems arbitrary, missing plenty. No “crostini”? No “sous vide”? And the feature “What’s Cooking Around Me?” — a button that presents the recipes currently being used by people geographically nearby — is just plain strange. Perhaps it’s an attempt to inject some locavorism into the app, but it comes off as creepy. Somebody near me right now is making Abalone Meuniere Mandarin; someone else is frying pickles. I feel like I am invading someone’s privacy knowing this. Maybe it serves as a random idea generator, but I would feel more comfortable not knowing what my nearest neighbors were up to.

Epicurious has a more curated set of suggested ideas, right on its home screen — a better bet for those who like to browse. As I noted, Epicurious is free, and should be the first thing any kitchen-loving iPad owner downloads. But if you have $5 $9.99 burning a hole in your iTunes account, get BigOven. Its extra features, community participation and iPhone compatibility make it an even better tool. Both will give you plenty to work on while you wait for iPad versions of Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio, Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything app and Nigella Lawson’s Quick Collection, among others, to make their way from the teeny iPhone screen to the bigger, more kitchen-savvy iPad one very soon.